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A rich, pathbreaking study on nineteenth-century rural Cuba, and how Afro-descendant peasants forged freedom through litigation and land occupation.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. Unenclosed people, unenclosed lands: Santiago de Cuba to 1800; 2. Foreign implants: The Saint-Domingue refugees and the limits of plantation development, 1791-1808; 3. Keeping people put: Enslaved families, policing, and the re-emergence of coffee planting, 1810s-1830s; 4. Manumission's legalities: From need-based prerogatives to merit-based entitlements; 5. 'A freedom with further bonds': Free people of African descent, property ownership, and color status; 6. 'Para levantar los negros y proclamar la República': The beginnings of the Cuban wars of independence in Santiago de Cuba; Conclusion; Appendices; Bibliography.
About the author
Adriana Chira is Assistant Professor of History at Emory University. Her research focuses on practices of litigation among socially marginalized groups – enslaved people, free Africans and Afro-descendants, and peasantries – in the Iberian Atlantic during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Summary
In nineteenth-century Santiago de Cuba, Afro-descendant peasants forged freedom and devised their own formative path to emancipation. Long before calls for national independence and emancipation in 1868, they wore down the institution of slavery through litigation and self-purchase. A rich, much-needed examination of Cuban history.
